New Year’s Resolutions

January 5, 2008

(1) Fewer squid.
(2) Keel fewer peoples with me mind bullets.
(3) Suffer fools better, so as to continue to like myself.
(4) Learn French or conquer the world.
(5) Stage “cat plays” renowned in the neighborhood for their rough truculence.
(6) Further develop the “demented sea captain” look I’m currently sporting.
(7) Learn to type with toes in case of horrible industrial accident.
(8) Write a story around the title “Buckwaldo Mudthumper Hocks a Hoe”.
(9) Fewer mushrooms.
(10) More meerkats.

Funny, my resolution was to eat more mushrooms, conquer the entire canton of ZÃƒÂ¼g without the use of French, and cut down drastically on my meercat intake (I find they make me feel heavy and cause me to have dreams).

For the demented sea-captain look, use the eye-patch too. It suits you well. Might even get you more free stuff? Exempli gratia: free advice (as follows). A pic with this look would be great on the back of your Predator book!

Could it be that learning French and conquering the world are mutually exclusive? After all, Charlemagne only spoke German and Napoleon was by birth Corsican, speaking French with an Italian accent his entire life.

No no no. There’s a special preparation for squid. It takes a little effort at first, but once you get the operation going, you’re set. It’s best if you’ve got contacts in Newfoundland.

Take your basic humbolt (but if you know any Newfies, get some A. dux, that’s the shit, man), find a specimen about 5 feet long and you lay’im out on a tarp. You’re not gonna keep it there, so don’t worry about the space it takes. Once you get it stretched out you roll the tarp up like you’re making a wrap with a tortilla. You take your squid wrap — it should weigh about 20 lbs and be pretty compact — and you put it in a styrofoam cooler, the kind grocery stores sell when summer rolls around. A 40 gallon size should be plenty.

The next part is the trickiest bit. You gotta dig around until you find a gardening supply place that’ll sell you Japanese crab mantis egg cases. The regular garden mantis won’t do. The Japanese crab mantis is the only one that has nymphs that can process the ammonia in squid. Normally, they’d be attracted to spots in your garden where the cats pissed, but these little guys are going to have a much cooler meal. The wimpy garden stores sell these by the egg case, but if you find one of the places that supply corporate landscapers you can buy the egg cases by the pound. You need about 1.5 pounds of crab mantis eggs for every 20 pounds of squid you’ve got.

You kind of pack the squid and the eggcases into the cooler, you duct tape it up so the stink can’t get out and then you let it sit for a month. The Japanese crab mantis is a cannibal, so as the nymphs mature they’ll move from feasting on squid to feasting on each other. The beauty of this setup is that after a month’s time all the mantis will be dead, the squid will be completely digested and you’ll have about a half pound of mantis egg cases you can use for your next squid. If you get 3 of these coolers going, you’ll have more squid powder than you can ever use, even if you use one of those pixie straws that start with candy in them.

The mantis you harvest from the squid will be kind of like a sourdough mother, the older the starter mantis you use, the better grade the stuff you get. I shouldn’t have to tell you, dude. The high from a 3rd generation mantis-reduced squid is amazing. Not only does it induce massive synaesthesia, but you also get narration to everything you do in the voice of the author you’ve read the most of. It’s like being made of LCD crystals and having dengue.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...